The impact of retrieval suppression on conceptual implicit memory

ABSTRACT

When people suppress retrieval of episodic memories, it can induce forgetting on later direct tests of memory for those events. Recent reports indicate that suppressing retrieval affects less conscious, unintentional retrieval of unwanted memories as well, at least on perceptually-oriented indirect tests. In the current study we examined how suppressing retrieval affects conceptual implicit memory for the suppressed content, using a category verification task. Participants studied cue-target words pairs in which the targets were exemplars of 22 semantic categories, such as vegetables or occupations. They then repeatedly retrieved or suppressed the targets in response to the cues for some of those pairs. Afterwards, they were exposed to the targets intermixed with novel items, one at a time, and asked to verify the membership of each of the words in a semantic category, as quickly as possible. Judgment response times to studied words were faster than to unstudied exemplars, reflecting repetition priming, as has been previously observed. Strikingly, the beneficial effects of prior exposure on response time were eliminated for targets that had been suppressed. Follow-up explicit memory tests also demonstrated that retrieval suppression continued to disrupt episodic recall for the items that had been just been re-exposed on the category verification test. These findings support the contention that the effects of retrieval suppression are not limited to episodic memory, but also affect indirect expressions of those memories on conceptually oriented tests, raising the possibility that underlying semantic representations of suppressed content are affected.     

The Role of Rules

The question of rules is not an issue that separates the 'analytical' and 'Continental' traditions from one another; rather it is an issue that is a source of division within each tradition. Within Continental philosophy the problem of the rule-governed character of cognition goes back to Kant's dualism of sense and understanding. Many philosophers in the Continental tradition (notably, Nietzsche, Gadamer and Adorno) have retained a quasi-Kantian conception of judgement while rejecting the idea of it as rule-governed. But there have been exceptions to this within Continental philosophy, most prominently, Jürgen Habermas. The rules thesis was implicit in much of analytical philosophy as it was practised in Britain from the 1950s to the 1970s. The doctrine gave support to a conception of philosophy (so-called 'ordinary-language philosophy') as essentially an exercise in the articulation of certain kinds of tacit knowledge. It was advocated explicitly in such works as Searle's Speech Acts and Winch's The Idea of a Social Science . The equation of meaning and rules enjoyed further prestige, for it was taken by many philosophers to be the central doctrine to be extracted from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations . A most striking feature of the receding of the rules thesis has been the transformation of previously accepted interpretations of Wittgenstein's later philosophy (for example, by Stanley Cavell and John McDowell). Both adherents and opponents of the rules thesis have shared a common concern. In emphasizing the discontinuity between language and the subject-matter of the natural sciences both sides offer reassuringly positive answers to one of the besetting problems of twentieth-century philosophy: does philosophy have a distinctive subject-matter of its own?     

Temporal specificity of extinction in autoshaping

Three experiments investigated the effects of varying the conditioned stimulus (CS) duration between training and extinction. Ring doves (Streptopelia risoria) were autoshaped on a fixed CS-unconditioned stimulus (US) interval and extinguished with CS presentations that were longer, shorter, or the same as the training duration. During a subsequent test session, the training CS duration was reintroduced. Results suggest that the cessation of responding during an extinction session is controlled by generalization of excitation between the training and extinction CSs and by the number of nonreinforced CS presentations. Transfer of extinction to the training CS is controlled by the similarity between the extinction and training CSs. Extinction learning is temporally specific.     

An integrated theory of the mind

Adaptive control of thought-rational (ACT-R; J. R. Anderson & C. Lebiere, 1998) has evolved into a theory that consists of multiple modules but also explains how these modules are integrated to produce coherent cognition. The perceptual-motor modules, the goal module, and the declarative memory module are presented as examples of specialized systems in ACT-R. These modules are associated with distinct cortical regions. These modules place chunks in buffers where they can be detected by a production system that responds to patterns of information in the buffers. At any point in time, a single production rule is selected to respond to the current pattern. Subsymbolic processes serve to guide the selection of rules to fire as well as the internal operations of some modules. Much of learning involves tuning of these subsymbolic processes. A number of simple and complex empirical examples are described to illustrate how these modules function singly and in concert.     

Body esteem and body fat in British school children from different ethnic groups

The aim of the study was to examine the relationship between body esteem and body fat in British school children. Two hundred and seventy seven, 11–14-year-old children from central England took part in the study. Body esteem was measured using the Body Esteem Scale for children and percent body fat was determined by skin-fold measures. Results indicate that body esteem and adiposity were negatively related for the whole sample, for boys and girls and for White children, Black children and Asian children. Factorial ANOVA also indicated differences in body esteem according to gender and ethnicity. Boys and Black children had significantly higher body esteem than girls and Asian children respectively. Differences in body fat were also evident according to gender with boys being leaner than girls. No differences in body esteem or body fat were evident across school years.     

Immigration

It is not a fundamental human right to live wherever one would most like to be. We have to ask when a state should admit people not its citizens wishing to enter and settle within its territory. To exclude someone from entry to a country where he wishes to settle infringes his liberty. When anybody's liberty is infringed or curtailed the onus of proof lies upon those who claim a right to infringe or curtail it, other things being equal. This paper argues that there are two reasonable grounds for refusing entry to would-be immigrants. First, in order to avoid genuine overpopulation; and second, to protect vulnerable cultures being submerged by large numbers of people of a more robust culture. Neither of these restrictions applies in the case of Britain and the paper concludes by demanding an immediate liberalisation of immigration laws and immediate public recognition by government of the benefits of immigration and determined discouragement of xenophobic propaganda against it. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Yin-Yang</Emphasis> and the Heart-Mind

The East Asian notion of a heart-mind (Chinese xin 心, Japanese kokoro こころ, and Korean maum ??) is arguably more accurate to our psychology than the Western term “mind” and its equivalents are: the latter term implies the possibility of psychological functioning in the absence of all emotion, and it can be shown that that is impossible. But then it turns out that we can update the traditional Chinese notions of yin 陰 and yang 陽 in such a way as to help us philosophically explain how our functioning psychology involves emotion and why any possible psychology has to rest on such a basis. Yin-yang is the essence of heart-mind, and heart-mind is essential to any functioning psychology.